The bots are coming!

[Sleepy Weasel]

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Programs are basically one's and zero's, they can't think for themselves. You can give a program data and have it react a certain way based on that data, but the program will still react the same way given the same data.

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Sorry, I think this is misleading/false. It is true that most programming is in the form, If this, then that, but that is not the only way to write a program. Adaptability is certainly possible.

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To take the next step you would have to give the program some sort of a way to adapt itself to how it has reacted in the "past" and then adapt to that data...etc, etc, etc.

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Artificial life programming techniques, such as genetic algorithms could do this. Forget about trying to encode rules for all possible situation, and think instead about a neural network taking a set of input (pot size, your hand, the board, other players actions, etc...) and producing an output. The network can be trained based solely on performance. Its my understanding that systems of this type often end up learning to be extremely effective at whatever they are being trained to do, and its often very difficult to understand just how they do it.

This is something I've been wanting to play around with for awhile, but lately actually playing and studying poker has taken up most of my spare time, not leaving much for side programming projects. But wouldn't it be fun to generate a population of poker playing bots, let them battle it out until you have a few good ones and then playing against them? Ok, I'm a nerd, sue me.